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New Atlantic article on Leonid Yacobson by Apollinaire Scherr


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The Atlantic has just posted an interesting article by Apollinaire Scherr, the Financial Times’ New York dance critic, on Soviet choreographer Leonid Yakobson, prompted in part by Janice Ross’ new book Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia.

Yakobson (of whom I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing** until I read this article) was Balanchine’s countryman and exact contemporary. Scherr views his work as a "the yin to [balanchine’s] yang" and a useful corrective to "the notion that Soviet ballet slept out the 20th century":

"Both Yakobson and Balanchine were formalists. Both understood choreography in essentially modernist terms—as a process of distillation, or “abstraction,” as it is more commonly known. But Balanchine began with the danse d’école, the movement lexicon inherited from the French court, while Yakobson started with the world, even if that meant setting the women’s pointe shoes aside and abandoning the standard turnout of the leg. Russian Orthodox to the end, Balanchine often presented the classical idiom as a veil through which to glimpse the metaphysical. The secular Yakobson saw ballet as a chance to illuminate our irrepressible natures and the eccentricities they breed."

She draws some interesting parallels with both Martha Graham and (!) Bob Dylan:

"But just as Dylan rewired folk, Yakobson—the singer-songwriter’s equal as artist-sponge and “cultural ventriloquist,” in Ross’s apt phrase—updated character dance. He distilled it down to its constitutive parts, to the feelings and impulses that harmonize as personality."

She closes with an observation about Balanchine’s heirs that nails what's so problematic with much of their work for me:

"In the decades following Balanchine’s death, ballet seemed to have reached a dead end. His heirs understood formalism as the most forward-looking and imitable of his many modes, but they didn’t appreciate how much its power depended on the spiritual yearnings and existential wisdom with which he infused the steps. Their work was dogged and desiccated, full of moves that signified nothing."

Unlike some critics however, (Jennifer Homans, I’m looking at you) Scherr thinks ballet’s future is "bright again."

Anyway, the article makes me want to seek out more of Yakobson’s stuff.

**Ahem. Even though, like many of us, I’ve seen this Baryshnikov performance of one of Yakobson’s works, Vestris.

ETA: Bonus footage -- a few minutes of the young Baryshnikov rehearsing Vestris with Jacobson in 1969, followed by a few more minutes of what looks to be a Soviet TV broadcast from about the same time.

OK. Now I'm beyond embarrassed. I just did a YouTube search on Yacobson's Shurale and got 2,930 results ... how I have managed not to notice him before is beyond me ...

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Yakobsen's Shurale is my favourite ballet and that of my friend. I was lucky enough to see it twice at Mariinsky this month, with Martynyuk and Evseeva as Syuimbike. I have seen Mariinsky many times in St Petersburg but never been there when Shurale was performed, so these performances were so special! I have also seen many films of it. It makes me cry every time, it is so beautiful! It has the most wonderful score and many beautiful moments for the corps of women birds, great spectacle, and, above all, the magical second act of celebration, where it seems literally the whole village comes out to play and everything is right in the world. It is probably unique in being an example of a folk ballet, although it is fiendishly difficult for the ballerina to perform. I love it very much!!! There are clips on YT. I wish the Mariinsky could tour with it so that more people could see it, as I think it is virtually unknown in the west, but maybe it is one of those ballets that, unfortunately, are really best seen in Russia. It has so much of the folk element, and involves dozens of Vaganova school children, and it would not be possible to take all these children abroad. Quite simply, children from any other dance academy, or dancers from any other training, would not be able to recreate this ballet effectively. Yakobsen choreographed a great production of Spartacus, which is currently in the Mariinsky repertoire also and is an amazing piece of theatre to the great Khachaturian score.

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When Baryshnikov came to the west and performed Vestris, there was indeed a big flurry of interest -- up till then he seemed like a closely held secret. And although more people heard his name after that, for years there was still almost no way to see any of the work.

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I got in contact with Apollinaire Scherr and asked her if, in light of her recent article, she had any video recommendations for those of us who were just learning about Yacobson and weren’t in a position to see much (if any) of his work live. She very graciously sent me the following list along with a few comments, and is happy to have me post it here:

Here are his "miniatures"—an hours worth, from a 1960 film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0TKf4CL2Bo

Here is a 1980 color film of the fairytale ballet Shurale, which the Mariinsky revived a few years ago; this is a very early full length. And in ballet fashion, it too is about a bird woman: a kind of mix of Swan Lake and La Sylphide (she has to lose her wings to love her man) based on a Tatar fairy tale. The score is fantastic. Yakobson had to lock the composer in his hotel room to get him to finish it in timely fashion. There are also many more recent clips from Mariinsky, but not the whole ballet in one go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqxWnKT3eHw

Here is Vasipova in Yakobson's late, "classical" work. He has always had famously acrobatic lifts (very Soviet, yes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWmxiL_tjwU&index=37&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

And old blurry youtube of his Spartacus (which preceded Grigorivich's by a decade)—Spartacus and his true love before he leaves for battle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6MY6wI36P0&index=19&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

Again from Spartacus. What I love about this is the mother of this seductive slave is mourning and lamenting right at the edge of her auction carpet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQyaAkQsdsg&index=28&list=PLtEk01XVd5CLB92a1iIaBUwwT0bXeXxTg

There are more, and I’m not sure I've even relocated the best, but you have to search in cyrillic as well as English, and in all the spellings in English (Yakobson, Yacobson, Jacobson) to get all of them.

I'm out of town and without broadband, so I haven't been able to do more than dip into these yet.

Enjoy!

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For those of you who would like to search for more Yacobson videos in Cyrillic as suggested:

Леонид Якобсон (Leonid Yacobson)

Леонид Вениаминович Якобсон (with patronymic - Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson)

Some additional search terms to try with his name:

Шурале (Shurale)

Спартак (Spartacus)

Вестрис (Vestris)

Хореографические миниатюры (Choreographic Miniatures)

OK. Bandwidth permitting, I'm going down the rabbit hole on this one ...

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I'm also glad that people are rediscovering Yakobson (Boston Ballet will be performing his Pas de Quatre next season). The language used to describe him here is a little puzzling to me, though - I would find it difficult to pick a 20th century choreography whom I would be less likely to describe as "formalist." All of Yakobson's ballets drip with plot and character and real-world associations, and that seems to have been something that he was constantly striving to do better. I worry that "modernist" and "formalist" are being conflated. The first I would happily ascribe to Yakobson, the second I would not.

Also, one more spelling that's sometimes used in English and might help on youtube - Iakobson.

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The language used to describe him here is a little puzzling to me, though - I would find it difficult to pick a 20th century choreography whom I would be less likely to describe as "formalist." All of Yakobson's ballets drip with plot and character and real-world associations, and that seems to have been something that he was constantly striving to do better. I worry that "modernist" and "formalist" are being conflated. The first I would happily ascribe to Yakobson, the second I would not.

Interesting -- I'll have to think about this. Oddly enough, since the only work of his that I'd seen more that snips of is "Vestris" I've always sort of associated Yacobson with Noverre, which of course would make him very much about expression rather than form.

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Interesting -- I'll have to think about this. Oddly enough, since the only work of his that I'd seen more that snips of is "Vestris" I've always sort of associated Yacobson with Noverre, which of course would make him very much about expression rather than form.

That actually really accords with how Yakobson viewed himself. He self-consciously aligned himself with Noverre - his memoirs/artistic statement is titled Letters to Noverre. In it, he claims that Noverre and Fokine are his two artistic inspirations and that the three of them (Noverre, Fokine, Yakobson) are the only three choreographers to have really made progress on the merging of dance and pantomime so that there is no divertissement in dance. (From the text of that book it seems like he was not burdened with a sense of false modesty either).

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I did see Yacobson's "Rodin" dances done by two SFB students at Janice Ross's talk the Jewish Museum and wondered if you could characterize Jacobson as a modernist. The pieces looked as if Jacobson was putting back the 19th c ornamentation and sentimentality that Rodin was moving away from.

Ross characterizes Yacobson as Balanchine's doppelganger or equal in the project of modernism but it's almost as if they crisscross in Prodigal Son and go other – perpendicular rather than parallel? – directions from there.

In some of the videos posted above I was reminded of "Russian Seasons" and wondered how much of an influence they had on Ratmansky.

Janice Ross's talk on Shostakovich Triology and Yacobson at SFB is here

http://podcast.sfballet.org/2015/pov_20150408.mp3

-edited-

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